“Are you trying to tell me you think there is a ghost or something living in this house? A great-smelling, male ghost, perhaps?” he asked, no longer able to contain his laughter.
“Of course not! I was mostly just trying to pinpoint where the scent was coming from. If I could, I would bottle it and make a fortune. I dunno, I’m probably just not used to the scent of nature.”
Even I could tell I was trying to convince myself more than him. We continued to eat in silence, me trying to figure out a way to change the subject and forget about this entire conversation. Dan looked like he was spacing out a little, so I had no idea what was going on in his head at all.
“So how’s work going?” I asked awkwardly, leaning back in my chair and rubbing my hands over my full stomach.
“It’s going well. The first month is usually just the planning phase anyway, identifying what we need to accomplish, figuring out a timeline, planning ways to accomplish everything necessary in the time allotted.”
“Hmmm.” Dan knew this was code to continue.
“A lot of team-building happens early on too, making sure we’re all on the same page and working well together.” He leaned back in his chair, rubbing the muscles at the nape of his neck absently.
“So, what’s this project all about? Have you met the owner of the company yet?”
I knew he wouldn’t be able to tell me much because of the highly confidential nature of it. His job title on his business card was a very vague “IT consultant.” Yep, that was it.
He grinned at me before responding. And while I could see the humor in his eyes at my question, I could also see them start to shutter, closing down the way they did any time I asked for more details about his work. “There’s not much I can say, babe, as much as I would love to. I’ve only met the owner of the company once. My new boss is Liam Maris.”
“Wait, you’re working for MarisCorp? Seriously?” I nearly jumped out of my seat at the mention of the mysterious billionaire.
“Yeah, I was just as shocked. Sorry I didn’t mention it sooner.”
“So, what’s Maris like?”
“I don’t really know. He’s extremely reclusive and I’ve only met him twice.”
“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got for me?”
“He owns an island nearby and he boats or choppers to and from the small facility here when necessary. Most work outside of administrative tasks happens at a facility on his island, so there is a pretty good chance I will spend most of my time working there.”
I knew I wasn’t going to get anything else out of him, so I changed my line of questioning. “You haven’t talked about your team much. Tell me about them.”
“There’s only four of us. There’s two other guys, Ben and Rashad, and one woman, Kelly. So far, they seem nice, and more importantly, very smart and hard-working. I have a good feeling about this, Ros.”
“I’m excited for you, Dan. And really proud of you.”
His answering smile warmed me from the inside. “Thanks, babe.”
He grabbed both of our plates off the table and walked to the kitchen. I stood up and walked over to the island, leaning over and resting on my crossed forearms, watching him as he rinsed our dishes and placed them in the dishwasher, so happy to just have him here with me.
“Hey, want to watch a movie?” He dried his hands off, a signal that he was done talking about work.
“Sure, what are you in the mood for? Wait, bedroom or living room?”
“It’s still pretty early, and I don’t want to go to bed just yet. How ’bout we watch in the living room? Let me just go get changed first.”
I walked into the living room, sat down, turned on the TV and got comfortable as I sifted through all of our saved movies on our Apple TV. Nothing looked remotely interesting, so I put the remote down and decided to let Dan choose. I knew what I would have chosen, and I was pretty sure he didn’t want to see one of my classics.
He came back a few minutes later in a gray t-shirt and loose gray lounge pants that hung on his hips in a seriously distracting way. He grabbed the remote off the table, slouched in the corner of the couch, getting comfortable, and opened his arms up for me to snuggle against him, wrapping his arms around me once we were settled.
“Did you find something for us that was filmed after 1970?” His laugh tickled my neck, sending a shiver down my spine. He continued to nuzzle into my neck, inhaling my scent as he waited for my response.
“Nope, it’s your turn.”
I barely suppressed my moan as he pressed featherlight kisses along my neck, my jawline, the corner of my mouth. This was quickly turning into something other than movie-watching.
I turned to face him fully, only to have him crash his lips into mine, at first hard and demanding, then slower and more seductive as I responded by gasping and turning my body flush against his. I could feel his growled response against my chest as he thrust his tongue into my mouth in a rhythm matching what I wanted him to do to my body.
The remote control crashed against the floor as it slipped out of his hand. I jumped up in surprise, which Dan took full advantage of by twisting us until he was sitting slightly slouched down. He pulled my thigh over his lap, so I was straddling him firmly.
His kisses alternated between passionate and harsh, and sweet and slow, leaving me breathless and gasping. Delicious pressure built between my thighs, desire and tension making me grind myself against him for relief. It didn’t make anything better, it never did. It only succeeded in making me burn hotter, want him more.
We continued at that maddening pace, not slowing down or stopping until our climaxes had crashed through us.
It was always like this. No matter the distance between us, the amount of time spent apart, we always came together without skipping a beat.
Frantic, desperate, familiar.
Even when all the other parts of us seemed to be tearing at the seams, this was always right. Maybe it was because things always felt both new and fleeting.
Until now, we never knew how much time we had together to enjoy each other, but it was never much. Our time together was always more famine than feast. My mind wandered, and I couldn’t help but think back to the night before we moved here.
We had just sat down to dinner, and I looked down into my food, avoiding eye contact until I could figure out what I wanted to say. I couldn’t ignore the tension anymore and I couldn’t pretend. How did I communicate that things were just not feeling right between us when communication was our biggest issue? Dan took it out of my hands.
“What’s up, babe?” he asked in a concern-laced voice.
“So,” I began and let the word hang for a minute. “I don’t know if it’s just me, but things have been feeling off between us lately.”
Dan’s smile faded, some of the light left his eyes, and it made me regret even bringing it up. My hands started to feel a little clammy as nervousness set in. This was so absurd. He was my husband, not some guy I had only been dating for a few months. The realization why hit me like a punch in the gut.
The disconnect, the unease all pointed to years of shitty communication, which we ignored and covered up with false intimacy and great sex. He was coming and going so much, our time together almost always felt a little like a honeymoon: reunion, elation, reacquaintance, the beginnings of getting comfortable together again, only to be halted by another separation.
I sighed and started again. “I hate to bring this up, but I just don’t want us going any further into this new start with any negative shit between us. You feel it too, right?”
He looked down a moment, and then looked back up. “Yeah, I’ve been feeling it the last couple weeks, but I didn’t want to bring it up and ruin anything,” he said.
“I’d gotten my hopes up so high and the reality of the situation began to creep in. We don’t know how much time we will actually get to be together and we don’t know how us living together will affect things. What if it doesn’t work?”
The minute the words left my mouth, I wanted to take it all back. I’d never pictured myself as an emotionally needy wife. I was used to being second place. It had always been fine because I knew Dan loved me. Lately, I couldn’t help but wonder if he would ever choose our marriage over work, if he would ever put us first. I knew there was nothing more I could say tonight without causing damage to us.
Dan grabbed my hand across the table and intertwined his fingers with mine.
“We don’t know what’s to come, and while it could be crazy and stressful, it could also be amazing. I never want to be the source of your unhappiness. I promise I will try to balance time at home with you and time spent on work as equally as possible.”
Tears welled up in my eyes and I tried to will them away. The first one slid down my cheek, then another, and another, before so many were falling, I couldn’t stop them. All the pent-up tension, worry, and emotion of the past few weeks just took over me, and I was a ball of emotions too out of control to handle.
Dan stood up and walked over to me, kneeling down beside my chair. I turned to him and he wrapped his arms around me, resting his chin on the top of my head. My arms gripped his waist, and before I knew it, I was crying again.
“Shhh, it’s okay, babe, I promise,” he said, rubbing my back. He lifted my chin up with his hand until my eyes met his. “I know things have been crazy recently, but everything is going to work out,” he said, looking me in the eyes, trying to be as reassuring as possible.
I rested my cheek against his chest, rubbed my face on the soft wool of his sweater and nodded. While I didn’t feel certain, he seemed sure enough for the both of us, and I realized it was going to have to be enough for me.
I knew not to get used to it. To not get my hopes up that we could build on this for the next six months or even year. I knew not to put full trust in what he had said that night or assume we could use our physical connection to help sew back together all the other parts of our relationship coming apart.
I knew not to, but God did I ever hope for it.
Seven
“So I did what anyone in my situation would do. I burned the place down when he went to work the next day,” Josie said.
“Wait, what?” I shrieked, pressing the phone closer to my ear.
“Seriously, Ros? What is going on with you? You’ve been so out of it this entire conversation, I just started saying the most ridiculous things to see if you were listening.”
“I’m sorry, Jos, I’ve just had a lot on my mind lately.”
I didn’t even know where to begin. I’d pretty much been avoiding all of my friends and hadn’t talked to Dan on more than a superficial level when he was around, which wasn’t often.
He kept saying things would calm down soon, but I was starting to think he was just telling me things to keep me thinking and feeling positive about all the changes and sacrifices we’d made to do this.
“So why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me about it. I know it’s different when we aren’t a ten-minute drive from each other, and I can’t just pop by unannounced to eat your food and drink your booze, but that doesn’t mean I’m any less here for you.”
“I know, I know.” I sighed.
“Actually, bitch, why aren’t we FaceTiming anyway? We can drink wine and bitch about how much you hate it there and how there’s a particular circle of hell for friends who fuck your boyfriends,” she said, obviously joking, but I knew her well enough to recognize the underlying sadness in her voice.
My phone buzzed in my hand. I looked at the screen and saw it was her wanting to connect to FaceTime.
“Did you just use FaceTime as a verb?” I asked as I answered the call.
“Damn straight I did. It’s an action, right? Hell, give it a couple of years, and I bet it will make its way into the dictionary! Anyway, I’ve got my wine.” She held up what might have been one of the biggest glasses I’d ever seen. “Where’s yours? C’mon, grab some, I’ll wait. We both need this girls’ night.”
I knew there was no way I was getting out of drinking something with her and it was feeling like a Jim Beam and Coke kind of night anyway.
“Hey, I’m gonna grab my iPad while I’m getting a drink, I’ll call you back when I get back outside, okay?”
I hung up before she had a chance to respond. I walked back out to the balcony off my bedroom a few minutes later, my iPad and stand tucked under my arm, a mug containing my drink in my hands, along with the bottle and an unopened can of Coke, just in case I wanted a refill. And to convince Josie I was, in fact, drinking something stronger than tea in my mug.
“Thatta girl,” she said when I called her back after setting my iPad up in its stand on the outdoor coffee table. She saw the table beside me with what I was drinking, and raised her glass up in the universal gesture for cheers. I half-heartedly mirrored her gesture.
“Okay, so let’s start with what crawled up your ass, and then I will retell my story of romantic woe, just without the embellishments. And go!” she said, taking a huge gulp.
It looked like she drank a quarter of her half-bottle-sized glass in one huge swig. I sighed and took a sip of my drink. “I don’t know, Jos. Nothing is really wrong, but things just don’t feel right, ya know?”
“Like what?”
“I think I need to get out more, meet more people. I’ve spent too much time alone in this house.” I paused and took another drink, staring off at the water below.
“I know how much you struggle with that, how hard it can be for you to come out of your shell.”
“I’m still in this creative rut. I thought I’d get here and instantly be moved by the environment to create new art.” I stopped and took a drink, trying to collect my thoughts into something coherent. Jos let me do my thing and didn’t try to interrupt. “I let my lack of inspiration keep me from creating a collection at home. So I stayed at the gallery helping Cindy, teaching classes for far longer than I should have. But now I don’t have that excuse and I just feel…”
“Stuck. You feel stuck,” Jos answered for me, seeing through my ramblings and finding the right word when I couldn’t.
“Yeah. And then Dan hasn’t been home much and is mentally wiped when he is. He says it’ll ease up and get better after this phase is done in a week or two.”
“Do you think it will?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.” I shrugged, trying to brush off what I was feeling. “I’m just disappointed things aren’t going as I expected. And I miss you guys so much.”
Josie looked at me, sipping her wine, attempting to stare into my soul or something through the screen. It was unnerving. I started to fidget and was about to say something when she started talking.
She always had some weird ability to see through my bullshit and the walls I put up, but I guessed it was one of the benefits of knowing someone almost all your life.
“So, all that shit makes sense. Being surrounded by trees all day every day by myself would probably drive me up a wall. But what else is bothering you? And don’t tell me nothing. I can see it, and you know it’s no use lying to me anyway. Spill.” She gave me her “I’ll cut you, bitch” look.
“Ugh, this is going to sound so stupid and ridiculous. Sometimes, and by sometimes I mean almost all the time when I’m the only one in the house, I get this feeling like someone is watching me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes it feels like someone is standing right behind me, other times it feels like someone is walking by and lightly brushing their fingertips against my arm or my neck or my hand. Sometimes there’s a sudden breeze when there shouldn’t be.”
“Okay, that’s strange, but continue,” she interjected as she took a sip of her wine.
“You wanna know what’s even more strange?”
“There’s something stranger than what you just told me?”
I ignored her sarcasm and pressed on. “Every single time this happens, I smell the best scent ever. It�
�s masculine, and crisp, and clean. I almost drool a little, it’s that good. I only smell it when I get the feeling that I’m not alone,” I finished, trying to take a sip of my drink, only to realize it was empty.
I refilled my mug while Josie looked at me curiously like she was trying to figure out if I was serious or not.
“Did you talk to Dan about this?”
“Yep.”
“And what did he say? I’m guessing his response was less than satisfactory if you are here reluctantly talking to me about it and all freaked out. I don’t know why you haven’t brought this up before now. We talk about everything, even anal sex!” she exclaimed.
“No, you talked about anal sex, I sat there uncomfortably trying to ignore you, wishing I was somewhere else.”
“I don’t understand what your issue with anal is. You shouldn’t be afraid of the back door. I bet you would love it if you tried it.”
“Okay, first of all, you have no idea whether I’ve tried it or not. Second, just because I don’t want to talk about something doesn’t mean I have an issue with it. Can nothing be sacred? Just because I won’t have detailed conversations about my sex life doesn’t mean I’m not having sex. I’m not a prude, there are just some things I think would be weird to go into detail about.”
“Yeah, yeah. You think I don’t know all this by now? It’s why we work, babe. We’re just different enough and similar enough not to want to kill each other,” she responded sweetly.
I laughed into my drink as she continued to look at me innocently, batting her lashes at me. She was right though. I was definitely the more reserved of the two, always more introverted and introspective, while she was hilarious, often crude, and utterly lovable.
“But really, what did he say?”
“He said it was probably nothing. It was likely an animal nearby, and the smell was probably the ocean, or his body wash. I don’t know, he pretty much brushed it off, and I already feel kind of stupid about the whole thing,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.
Through the Mist Page 4
